> If I understand the OP's intentions, he just wants to prove that the
> disks are either good or garbage. My contention is that if you get
> bonnie to run long and hard enough it will prove what he is looking for.
I suggest reading how Spinrite works.
Spinrite uses patterns which exercise corner modulation cases. This causes
drive's electronics to get "bad" signals where normally it'd get marginally
acceptable signals. I.e. it can allow the drive to predictively remap sectors
due to pressure from read errors which were artificially induced by careful
selection of data patterns.
Your likelihood of getting that effect with "bonnie++ running long enough" is
same as getting a few thousands bits to match by exhaustive search. Our solar
system will be long dead before it'd have a chance of finishing.
Cheers, Kuba